Life Lessons: Wet Dreams

Words + Photos - Esker

I’m waxing my board, I know the surf is pumping. I have a wave of inner calm within my body, but the process of getting ready is so unlike me. I meticulously check leash string, leash, deck pad, run my hands over my board feeling everything as if its the first time I have ever touched it.

I am always only in board shorts, it’s all I need on a warm summers day. The sun beats down on my my face as I step outside and there is a light and warm off shore at my back. I walk calmly down a lane and then over a boardwalk to the top of a dune, and before me are lines of perfectly groomed surf stretching out to the horizon. I pause for a minute look up and down the beach, it’s not empty, other surfers are out getting barrelled, dong turns, paddling out dry haired in perfectly formed channels.

The surf itself is a little overhead, challenging, but no too big to be in anyway intimidating. I step off the boardwalk and feel the sand between my toes. The sensation is always intense, as if my nerve endings are wrapping around individual grains. I break into a trot, then bam……

I hit a brick wall, sometimes someone appears and starts talking to me, I look over his shoulder but the vision of the ocean and perfect surf diminishes, other times I keep walking but the sea gets further away. Other times I wake up with no warning. Whatever, I never actually get to surf in my dreams. In fact I don’t think I have ever even made the paddle out in a dream. Never, and I know I am not alone in this phenomenon so what does it mean?

Well it’s devastatingly simple, and obvious. Our dreams are reflections of life, and in my life I hardly ever go surfing, there is usually a reason, sometimes because of work totally valid, or a family commitment. But more often than not it’s down our own choices, of simply not going surfing enough. These dreams of not quite making the surf, are simply our inner consciousness telling us we need to go surfing more, it’s a simple and quite beautiful answer to a recurring dream that just will not go away…